giardia misdiagnosed as c diff - wanted to share my story
hi everyone, I had c diff in 2012 after taking amoxicillin; took it again for an ear infection a couple weeks ago (also took preventative vancomycin bc I knew of the recurrence risk). Anyway sure enough, a week after the antibiotics were over, I got bad and familiar diarrhea. PCR test positive, tox test negative but my doc figured maybe the tox test was a false negative and since I had symptoms and a history, started me on dificid. Absolutely no improvement (doc was saying maybe post-infectious ibs) so I begged for additional testing and sure enough, almost a week later - positive for giardia/cryptosporidium. (Not sure which of these I actually had - an infectious disease doc friend of mine says that they can both show up positive on labs even if you just have one). Took three days of Nitadoximide and it immediately fixed things. Apparently those two parasites can ALSO show up soon after antibiotics. Sharing my story in case it helps others bc if I hadn't asked for testing it would have been a long road.